Abortion In Washington

Wednesday, December 21, 2016

In
mid-October, a member of my school’s Students for Life club discovered that
Planned Parenthood was listed among the school’s “community partners.” Being
that we attend a tiny, Christian school, this came as quite the surprise to the
group. As a member of the student newspaper, I decided to investigate further.

Whitworth Students for Life (J. Silberman, right)

Community
partners are those organizations which Whitworth professors decide to use as
resources for student learning, volunteering, and internships. There were a 153
such organizations listed on the school’s website.

In addition,
Whitworth:

Had tear-off cards on walls around campus
referring pregnant women to Planned Parenthood (which have since been taken
down).

I was, of
course, expecting a response from both sides of the abortion debate, but I
didn’t anticipate the magnitude. The story got picked up by LifeSiteNews, Life
News, Live Action, Campus Reform, Washington Times and a number of others. I
was receiving threats from hippies in California and praise from pastors in
Kansas.

Locally, the
story led to a club being formed to support abortion rights, although I do not
know as of yet whether Whitworth will allow the club to charter. They showed
up to our next Students for Life event and protested, forcefully at first,
surrounding us and our display and not letting anyone near. They moved to the
outside of the HUB once we alerted security that we had the space reserved.

The Administration Responds

On Dec. 2,
Whitworth Students for Life met with two members of school administration to
discuss the situation and suggest a few changes. Our message was threefold:

As an institution of higher learning, we
understand that it isn’t your role to take sides on political issues. Abortion, however, is not a political issue. It is an issue of immense human pain and
suffering. For any institution, but especially a religiously-affiliated one, to
give credence to the idea that dismembering a human being is morally acceptable
is abhorrent. The school has a responsibility to stand up and be counted on
this issue.

Even if abortion weren’t so abhorrent, to
affiliate with Planned Parenthood makes no business sense. For decades, Planned
Parenthood has skirted around the law with ease due to their political
connections. With Jeff Sessions and his 100% pro-life record as the soon-to-be
U.S. Attorney General, Planned Parenthood is about to go down in flames.
Whitworth needs to get off that ship soon lest they get pulled down with it.

Whitworth should replace all links to Planned
Parenthood with I-Choice, the local pregnancy resource center. Student interns,
as well as pregnant women, are in much better hands there.

Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Spokane

On the
Planned Parenthood front, the school was unwilling to budge. The two
administrators stated emphatically that they only hire professors whom they
trust to teach students, and that they had no interest in telling professors
what to include or not include in their classes. Planned Parenthood remains a
“community partner” and the two administrators stated that Planned Parenthood
would continue to be allowed to have booths on campus to recruit students if that
is something professors wanted.

The
administrators were, however, amicable to getting I-Choice more involved on
campus. The volunteer center scheduled a meeting with them and I-Choice will be
an option for service-learning moving forward.

It was
frustrating, to say the least, to receive pushback from Christians on the idea that human
dismemberment was objectively immoral. I do think, however, a few observations
need to be made before coming to final judgement.

Bad, but not the Worst, Alas

Whitworth is
far more conservative than the vast majority of their competitors in higher
education. For instance, Pacific Lutheran University advocates “sex positivity” in some
departments and administers Next Choice and Ella pills in their health center.
Normally these pills are able to prevent conception from occurring. In the case that ovulation has already occurred, however, the pill eats away at
the uterine lining which prevents the embryo from being able to implant itself. In such cases, these pills act as abortifacients. A Lutheran
school is administering this on campus.

Around the
same time the drama at Whitworth was unfolding, a Catholic university in
Chicago had their medical students perform “mock abortions” on a papaya, with
the seeds representing the child. The University of Chicago and the University
of New Mexico have medical centers which perform second trimester abortions.

In my
original article I wrote:

“The only mitigating factor of my distaste towards
the actions of the school in regard to Planned Parenthood and abortion is the
fact that I know this isn’t just a Whitworth problem.”

I should have clarified
further. Relatively speaking, Whitworth is downright conservative, as hard as
that may be to believe.

Student-made posters at Whitworth University, a "conservative" Christian school

This is not
a Whitworth problem, per se. It’s an education problem, higher education in particular.
There aren’t textbooks which accurately relay information about abortion risks
and fetal development and there aren’t many professors who care. They’re more
than happy to take their talking points straight from NARAL and Planned
Parenthood.

This doesn’t
exonerate Whitworth, but it puts their actions in perspective.

Dilemma for Christian Parents

I received
many emails from concerned parents of teens who said they will reconsider
recommending Whitworth to their kids and their neighbors. I told these parents
that no matter where they send their kids, unless it’s a straight-up Bible
College, these ideas will be pushed on them, and that Whitworth actually has
remained truer to its Christian roots than most “Christian” schools. There are
still a number of active ministries on campus and, from what I hear, a great
theology department.

Nevertheless, I
would support plans to pressure the school to cut all ties with
Planned Parenthood. If that were to happen, it would be unfortunate that an
example would be being made of a relatively conservative school, but it is
difficult for me to feel bad for a school that allows Planned Parenthood to
recruit student on campus, allows their professors to tell students that
Margaret Sanger was a hero, and gives them textbooks that depict pro-lifers as
violent misogynists.

There needs
to be wholesale change in the American education system. We’ve allowed the
pro-abortion side to run campuses and curricula for far too long.

A Silent – and Scared – Majority

The biggest
thing I learned through this ordeal has to do with the nature of the debate. In
the weeks following the publishing of the story, I was surprised to discover
that most people on campus actually agreed with me. This is surprising because
few were willing to say that publicly, and the public stream of conscious rage
displayed by dozens of abortion supporters creates the impression that they
are the majority. This finding is consistent with recent
data. According to a Students for Life survey, 53% of millennials oppose
abortion in all or most cases and 17% oppose it in all cases.

The problem
is that pro-life individuals are far more hesitant to speak up than their
pro-abortion counterparts. Despite PP’s extreme views on abortion representing
a tiny minority of Americans, their positions have been mainstreamed by the
media and the education system. Anyone who speaks against these ideas is
publicly ridiculed and even threatened. I merely got a few mild threats of
physical violence, but a previous Whitworth Students for Life president
received numerous death threats. This seems to be the preferred tactic of the Left.

If the
pro-life movement is going to succeed, it’s members are going to have to be
brave. You will be publicly dressed down. You will be called a bigot and a
misogynist, even if you’re a woman. You will be out of place on a campus where
pro-life ideas are pushed to the fringe. But once you get past that, you’ll
realize there are a lot more people on your side than you thought and also that
there’s nothing the Left can do to you that’s worse than knowing you could have
done something and didn’t.

Thursday, June 30, 2016

We are going to continue with our series highlighting reviews by past customers of abortion clinics in Washington State. The following is an anonymous review of Cedar River Clinics, in Tacoma.

A Google User6 years agoI had an appointment for termination and was kinda shocked when I arrived at the clinic. It is located in one of the really not so nice areas of Tacoma and as I stepped inside it got even worse. I was given a bunch of paperwork and was told to plan up to 6h in the clinic. Well now I know why. They do not care about you as a person, your feelings and emotions. It is like mass abortion!! The place is pretty run down, growded with tons of people waiting for their appointments and I do not even want to go into details about the sort of people sitting next to you in the waiting room. One lady was sitting there, telling me she was a little out of it cause you are not allowed to use street drugs 24h before the procedure. I was absolutely disgusted and scared!!! I decided to leave and made an appointment with a different clinic!!

The review elicited a response from Beverly Whipple, the clinic owner, a year later. Ms. Whipple didn't deny the woman's experience and instead declared how proud she was to have customers like those filling the waiting room.

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

The following is a review posted on Google Reviews by someone identifying themselves as "Yuna Kim". We are not able to provide independent corroboration at this time. This review was of Planned Parenthood in Bellevue, Washington.

Even though I fully support Planned Parenthood, some of these people have put me through a lot and made me feel reeeaaally really guilty for needing birth control.

Im not sure if I spoke with someone from the Bellevue location or maybe someone from a help center of some sort, but I called yesterday morning to ask a couple questions. I gave the woman over the phone a very veeery bad, brief version of my situation which was; I missed my depo appointment at the beginning of the month and had unprotected sex at the end of the month. I wrongly assumed I didn't have to go through how this happened and justify my mistakes because I expected the staff at Planned Parenthood to be respectful and understanding. However the woman I spoke with got furious with me. She started yelling at some points, cutting me off while talking, asking condescending and rhetorical questions like "well what do you THINK is gonna happen!?". I was asking for clarifications on how my Depo shot works and she kept barking "I dont know WHERE you got this INFO but you are WRONG!" At the end of the conversation I was in tears and asked "what did you say your name was again?". She paused for a second and then hung up. If I went into details of how I got in this situation, I would have explained to her how it wasn't consentual and how the reason I never got my shot was because the clinic messed up my scheduling and was also rude about it. I didn't want to explain this. But if I did maybe she would've treated me like a human being.

Planned Parenthood staff, if someone reads this, please contact me. I don't feel comfortable using your services right now. I need it, but I feel attacked for something that wasn't entirely in my control. And even if it was, there is no excuse to belittle your clients for using your services.

Saturday, November 23, 2013

Attorney unable to find co-counsel willing to go up against "Mob-like" giant

The two things you expect Planned Parenthood to be good at, diagnosing unplanned pregnancies so they can be targeted for abortion, and administering birth control, are the subject of a medical malpractice lawsuit filed by a Tacoma woman in December of 2012.

The woman, whom we will call SJ in this report -- but who is identified in the lawsuit of course -- was given Depo Provera birth control injections during the course of a pregnancy, a pregnancy that PP failed to identify despite claiming to have administered two high-sensitivity pregnancy tests. She only found out she was pregnant at 6.5 months, and claims a series of emotional and physical health problems not only to herself, but also to her baby. The lawsuit also points out that PP has had her on Depo for 10 years, even though the manufacturer recommends 2 years maximum.

In the complaint, SJ states:

"My child's delivery was a terrifying experience. After my daughter was delivered, I began to pass blood clots. The doctors could not stop the passing and could not determine its source. I had to be transported to the operating room and the doctors had to operate on me to stop the bleeding. I lost large amounts of blood and had to have a blood transfusion.

My life is forever altered as a direct result of [Planned Parenthood Tacoma]'s actions. I have been affected financially, emotionally, and physically. Many things in life are painful that were never painful before as a result of being on Depo-Provera for ten years. I have joint pain, muscle pain, and experience symptoms associated with bone weakness. If I ever want to be intimate with someone again without experiencing extreme pain, I will have to seek therapy to relax my permanently-contracted pelvic floor muscles. My relationships with family and friends were forever altered by [Planned Parenthood]'s failure to diagnose my pregnancy. I trusted [Planned Parenthood] to assist me in my family planning goals and I was sorely mislead and disappointed."

She went to Planned Parenthood Tacoma's clinic in June, 2011, in order to get put (back) on Depo Provera birth control, which is administered as an injection every three months. She was reportedly given a "high-sensitivity" pregnancy test which came back negative, although it turns out she was just over 1 month pregnant at the time. She was given the Depo injection.

Three months later she returned for the next injection, in September, 2011. She asked for a pregnancy test. She was told this was standard policy. She gave a urine sample, and waited for 45 minutes for the results. In her declaration, she claims:

"[The nurse] assured me that the pregnancy test had come back negative."

Then she was given another Depo injection. She specifically asked about a host of pregnancy symptoms, and repeatedly expressed concern that she might be pregnant, but was assured by the PP nurse that her symptoms were side-effects of the contraceptive.

It wasn't until November when the woman did a series of home pregnancy tests that she found out she was pregnant. All of the tests came back positive. She was 6 months pregnant at this point.

Planned Parenthood has claimed that they were not required to provide a pregnancy test at the second, September visit. They have studiously managed to avoid explaining why the nurse told SJ that there was a negative pregnancy test result, leading to another Depo injection, when no test was actually done.

"Nobody Wanted to Touch It."
SJ had to go all the way to Everett to find an attorney who would take on Planned Parenthood. When we spoke with her attorney, Jenna Labourr of Labourr Law, Ms. Labourr told us that she had originally tried to find someone to co-counsel with her on the case. "But nobody wanted to touch it. Nobody wanted to touch it. Nobody wanted to go up against Planned Parenthood."

She added that at first, when they heard about the client and her situation, other attorneys initially expressed interest and willingness to help. But once she revealed who the defendant was, they all started backing out. She wasn't naive going into this, but noted that the response from other attorneys was "kind of a shock to me," because it was not an ideological case. Some have compared this phenomenon to the going up against The Mob.

Ms. Labourr said she took this case, which argues that Planned Parenthood is guilty of Medical Malpractice, Negligence, and "Lost Chance" -- not Wrongful Birth -- because Planned Parenthood was recklessly endangering this woman's body with their incompetence and indifference.

"I'm an activist for women's rights," Ms. Labourr told us. "I've never been a fan of Planned Parenthood. I've never sent women there. They don't care about their patients." Indeed, she has been involved in activism against sexual trafficking, serving on the staff of Human Rights Society, and has worked with Hope for Justice. She has done work helping victims of domestic violence, and even went to a law school that was originally founded as a law school for women. Normally Planned Parenthood seeks to destroy people who try to hold them accountable, smearing them as being "anti-woman". Good luck with that.

We asked Planned Parenthood why it is that nearly all the lawyers in Western Washington are scared of them, and if it was because of anything illegal. They declined to comment or respond to any of our inquiries. Ms. Labourr expressed concern about the health and safety of women going to get services from Planned Parenthood if they don't have any legal recourse in the event that PP causes them permanent harm, because they can't even find a lawyer.

"Definitely Stacked"
Planned Parenthood didn't spare any expense and hired Rebecca Ringer, of Floyd, Pflueger and Ringer, an Ivy League trained attorney, known for successfully defending Big Health Care against claims from the battered and bruised.

Ms. Labourr knew she was taking on a giant with this case. She observed that PP used their seemingly bottomless reservoir of cash to file spurious motions and subpoenas, to mislead the judge with legal red herrings, trying to compel discovery of records they don't need, all to get her exhausted or to run out of funds.

Ms. Labourr said PP's attorney even "provided false information to the Court."

"They're not bound by any morality or even honor," explained Ms. Labourr. "They are ruthless, and will stop at nothing."

Last month the Pierce County judge in the case granted Planned Parenthood's motion to dismiss the case. Ms. Labourr took it as a given that many judges in this state are in the pocket of Planned Parenthood, though she didn't accuse them of taking bribes. She was hoping that being in Pierce County -- and not King -- she might have a better chance of finding a fair judge.

But she observed that Judge Garold E. Johnson "had made up his mind before we got there. He wasn't willing to consider anything additional."

He decided, despite case law, that Ms. Labouur needed to provide input from a medical expert, but refused to give her 30 days to come up with one. He bent over backwards to accommodate Planned Parenthood's concerns and let them keep coming back to amend their complaint. "It was definitely stacked."

Ms. Labourr did win a motion to reconsider, and was going to file an appeal, but her client is exhausted and feels like there is no hope for justice against Planned Parenthood in this state. Score another round for Planned Parenthood in their War on Women.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

It's time to write about the rest of the story when putative late-term abortionist Julie Komarow, M.D., sought a restraining order on your humble correspondent, one of the writers for this blog. This story includes a run-in with armed U.S. Marshals and a threat of federal charges including fines and jail time.

We have reported on the fact that Dr. Komarow went berserk simply because we tried to interview her for a story. As serious and diligent journalists, we never want to accuse anyone of anything without verifying it first, and that means making every reasonable effort to contact individuals one is writing about to give them a chance to comment, including deny, what you are saying about them. In our view, three separate attempts via separate communication channels (land-line, cell phone, email) meets that standard.

This is what we did with Dr. Komarow. Yet for psycho-spiritual reasons that remain opaque to us, Julie Komarow elected to view our attempts to reach her as life-threatening harassment! That might be explainable, for how many of us really understand the internal workings of a mind that has rationlized decades of cold blooded murder of little babies at one's own hand -- but the drama and mystery was compounded by her circle of enablers that -- instead of challenging her delusions -- reinforced and encouraged them.

Some of these were colleagues, including pro-life evangelical Christian doctors. Some of them were police officers. And some of them were United States Marshals and the Department of Justice, including the ever-embattled Attorney General, Eric Holder.

When Komarow filed her first restraining order on us, it indicated that she had asked the King County Sheriff's office to open an investigation into this writer, and put the Bonney Lake police on the lookout for me. Moreover, it indicated she had contacted the U.S. Marshal's service and asked them to protect her and investigate me. Instead of laughing in her face and telling her that the Department of Justice come to the beck-and-call of mass murders, these law enforcement agencies went into service for this career-long abortionist as if they were the Blackwater of Baby Terrorists. They harassed me and my family in the process because of our attempts to protect innocent children. This was once the proud activity of the police.

The Restraining Order application includes, in Komarow's own handwriting:

At the first court hearing, my attorney Alex Thomason quickly noticed that two of the women accompanying Komarow in the courtroom were conceal-carrying handguns. He immediately surmised that these were US Marshals. (Both were female, with short hair, and generally man-ish features.)

Indeed, later when the Judge asked Komarow to explain herself, after turning on the tears and claiming to be living in terror because a journalist wanted to interview her, one of the Marshals -- presumably Walker -- got up to speak to the judge on her behalf. This Marshal then declared that the Attorney General had instructed them to take this case "very seriously". She added that she had not just opened any investigation into me, but a federal F.A.C.E. Act investigation.

For those not familiar with the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrancies (F.A.C.E.) Act, this legal affrontery is one of Janet Reno and Bill Clinton's sad legacies. Ms. Reno became obsessed with destroying the lives of stay-at-home moms and grandmas who were trying to help save women and babies from the billion dollar abortion juggernaut. Not satisfied with the legal options available to her, she crafted and passed this bill which allows the federal government to punish pro-life activists with $10,000 fines and jail time if their actions can be shown to have physically blocked someone's access to an abortion mill.

So how, you are wondering, does Eric Holder convince some fine upstanding United States Marshals to pretend that two or three phone calls and a couple of emails soliciting an interview in order to avoid slander amounts to blockading an abortion clinic?

Every time you think you have plumbed the depths of the sick and twisted imaginings of the Obama Administration and its conspiracies of evil, you find out it is even sicker than you thought.

You also have to realize that Dr. Komarow didn't have to go pleading and begging and winding her way through the bureaucracy to make all this happen. The gun-toting authorities from the local cops up to the Department of Justice are apparently standing at the beckon-call of the baby-killing professionals.

It's worth pointing out that at no time did Heather Stone call me up and ask me any questions. At no time did she attempt to get my side of the story.

What did happen, however, was that we noticed that among the visitors to our blog after this point was "usdoj.gov". They would come back regularly for quite some time. One must assume that they were monitoring our writings, police-state-style, to see if they could come up with some way to show we had crossed some unknown line so they could give a knock on my door in the middle of the night. Can you say: Chilling Effect?

Welcome to the Democrat Nightmare. Brought to you by Low Information Voters across this land.

Monday, November 04, 2013

A couple of months ago there was news coverage of a story from Bellingham, Washington, in which the local Planned Parenthood (PP) abortion mill was accused of covering up the rape of an 10 year old Hispanic girl.

What no-one disputes is that PP Bellingham murdered this little girl's unborn baby.

But new police records obtained by this blog reveal a shocking discovery: when the Whatcom County Sheriff contacted the Bellingham Planned Parenthood in order to collect evidence in the child rape case, the abortion clinic representative told the police that they simply were going to break the law that required them to cooperate with the police.

The actual rape occurred in September 2012, when Luis Gonzalez-Jose, an illegal immigrant farm worker living in Everson, near Lynden, Washington, raped the then-11 year old daughter of the woman he was living with.
The girl became pregnant and Mr. Gonzalez-Jose secretly took her to Planned Parenthood -- where presumably all child rapists go to "clean up" their crimes -- in nearby Bellingham to have the unborn baby killed. Mr. Gonzalez-Jose pretended to be the girl's father, and told her to claim that her "14-year-old boyfriend" got her pregnant.

In Washington, having sex with a girl under 12 is statutory rape (rape of a child in the first degree) if the male is not married to her (!) and is more than 2 years older. To the surprise of many, Planned Parenthood seems to have complied with this part of the law, and reported the case to Child Protective Services, because the purported age difference here, though fabricated, was still illegal.

But Planned Parenthood still did the abortion, despite knowing that this girl clearly was in no position to provide informed consent and was not accompanied by a documented parent! The fact that coercion was very probably involved apparently didn't slow them down one bit. (How often does a pregnant teenager come in for a voluntary abortion with just her father, and not her mother?) PP broke no Washington law by doing an abortion on a minor under coercion from her rapist, if you can believe that. And Attorney General Bob Ferguson loves it that way apparently.

While this much of the story has already gained some local publicity (and nationally in pro-life circles), what we can reveal for the first time is what happened when Deputy Alan Smith from the Whatcom County Sheriff’s office contacted PP in order to get a copy of their records in order to help prosecute the rapist.

The police record, authored by Deputy Smith, states the following:

"On the afternoon of 09 18 2012, I contacted Mt. Baker Planned Parenthood to obtain a copy of the records documenting 's treatment at their care (sic!) facility. I was referred to their records contact ... Sherry who told me Planned Parenthood would not follow the mandated reported (sic) law as codified in RCW 26.44.030.12(b) and refused (to) provide 's medical records. I then advised Planned Parenthood that I would seek a court order for their records on ."

In other words, the woman working in the records department told the police officer that PP was going to knowingly and openly break the law, a law designed not to help prosecute them, but to help prosecute the perpetrator of a terrible sexual assault on a minor! In so doing she obstructed the investigation of a vicious crime. There are numerous questions that need to be answered here:

Was this a one-time event, or is this routine behavior? The record doesn’t show Sherry consulting with her superiors or an attorney, but immediately “implementing” this shocking policy on her own.

Who told Sherry to talk to the police this way? (Note that if I was going to tell a police detective to take their law and shove it, I would probably not do it myself but rather tell them to talk to my supervisor or attorney. The fact that rank-and-file PP staff feel empowered to give the police the finger themselves raises all sorts of questions about how far and wide this goes.)

Assuming this is PP policy, does it hold true for the entire state? The country? Is there any reason to believe that PP Bellingham is the only affiliate doing this? That they came up with this on their own?

If they flout this law that they don't like, how many other laws do they ignore because they don't like them? Do they just pick and choose which laws they follow and which they do not? Are they completely above the law?

Most people who openly break laws suffer consequences; why don't they? Who is protecting them? This woman seemed to act as if she had no fear of reprisal. And apparently she was right. Is there some arrangement or understanding between PP and “law enforcement”? We have made numerous repeated attempts to get Deputy Alan Smith to answer our questions about why PP suffered no consequences for breaking the law and obstructing justice but he has declined all offers to comment.

There are even more unanswered questions in this story. PP apparently reported the statutory rape to CPS voluntarily when they might have gotten away with it. But then, after doing the coerced abortion, they decided to violate the mandatory cooperation law right to the face of the police as noted above.

And in a further twist, the abortionist, a Dr. Katherine Dickinson, apparently took the initiative and called the police to tell them she still had the aborted baby she killed sitting in her freezer at work. And rather than the police coming to arrest this woman who just admitted to the police that she murdered a baby in cold blood, the police came by and collected the literally cold blood for a DNA sample, and thanked the murderer for her cooperation!

On top of all this, we can't find evidence of a single pro-life politician in the state who wants to condemn the actions of PP or the police in this matter or call for changes.

...I would now like to say a special word to women who have had an abortion...[many people are] aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and [do] not doubt that in many cases it was a painful and even shattering decision. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong. But do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance. The Father of mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace ... You will come to understand that nothing is definitively lost and you will also be able to ask forgiveness from your child...With the friendly and expert help and advice of other people, and as a result of your own painful experience, you can be among the most eloquent defenders of everyone's right to life. Through your commitment to life, whether by accepting the birth of other children or by welcoming and caring for those most in need of someone to be close to them, you will become promoters of a new way of looking at human life. -- Pope John Paul II